Lazycoder

Reading this comment thread reminds me of something

Brain.Save() – SOAP’s not boring; Amazon’s not RESTful; can’t we all move on?

Back in a former life, I was a Biochem major so this story requires a little bit of background information.

As you use your muscles, specifically overuse, you burn oxygen to power your muscles. When you burn more oxygen than you take in your muscles burn glucose, a sugar, to keep working, one of the byproducts of burning sugar is a molecule called Lactic Acid. One of the ways that you build larger muscles is by breaking down muscle fibers in whatever muscle group you are working. When the muscles rebuild, they build more fibers in the area of the break. (This is greatly simplified)

I remember one time a friend and I had a long discussion involving several people over exactly HOW that muscle fiber breakdown occured. I argued that the lactic acid build up weakend and broke down the muscle fibers. My friend argued that the physical stress of working out would snap the muscle fibers. This was of great concern to us because we were working out every day after labs and wanted, in true geek fashion, to maximize the time we spent working out. We theorized that by loading up on creatine we could decrease the amount of lactic acid build up and working out harder for a longer period of time. This was very important to us.

We finally went to a physiology prof. and asked him. He said that the lactic acid build up probably weakend the muscle fibers to the point where they would break more easily when stressed. So we were both right after a fashion and loading up on creatine probably wouldn’t have helped us build muscle mass faster at all since the “burn” that helped the muscle breakdown process along wouldn’t happen as quickly. Then there was the little gastrointestinal distress side effect of creatine loading that didn’t sit well in our stomachs (har har) The rest of the biology majors didn’t really care since they were working out just to get fit or they weren’t working out at all.

That little discussion over in Steve Maines comments just reminded me of that discussion my friend and I had. In the end, both side of the SOAP vs. REST vs. Amazon are probably a little right and it doesn’t mean squat to the rest of us.